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March 24 - March 30, 2019
With so little drug required to induce a biological effect, Dreser reasoned that people would be much less likely to become addicted to the drug. At last, a safe, effective pain reliever.
my dude, you really don't understand addiction, do you?
In 1898, Bayer launched their new drug, calling it heroin. Aspirin, which physicians worried might cause gastritis, could be obtained by prescription only. Heroin, which was believed to be much safer, could be purchased over the counter.
oh no...
SCIENTISTS HAD HOPED that morphine could treat opium addiction. Then they had hoped that heroin could treat morphine addiction. It was time to try something else. Again, they would synthetically modify a drug to separate pain relief from addiction. And again, they would fail. This time, spectacularly.
Portenoy believed it was time for American physicians to get over their fear of painkillers, what he called “opiophobia.”
this motherfucker
The days of opium, morphine, and heroin were behind them.
HAHAHAHAHA. no
Enough painkillers were now being prescribed to medicate every adult living in the United States around the clock for a month.
!!!!!!!!!
Just as Bayer had continued to market heroin when it was evident that the drug was causing harm, Purdue had been slow to inform the public about the potential dangers of OxyContin.
these fucking guys
THE LESSON FROM THE ILL-FATED WAR on pain is a simple one: It’s all about the data.
preach it!
If you’re going to medicate a nation, at the very least you should base your recommendations on a mountain of evidence, not a molehill.
<3
Although scientific data on the relationship between fat consumption and human health remained, at best, ambiguous, the United States federal government was determined to impose clarity.
they had nothing better to do...
After Mottern’s report was made public, McGovern’s staffers decided that it might be a good idea to get input from more than one scientist.
you THINK?!
Although they didn’t know it at the time, Americans were now unwitting test subjects in a national experiment to see if restricting dietary fat reduced the incidence of heart disease.
...i got nuthin
During the next 20 years, three major studies involving 300,000 people and costing about $100 million determined the relationship between dietary fat and heart disease. The answer: There wasn’t any.
*golf claps*
Unlike studies of total fat, total cholesterol, and unsaturated fats—where findings had been contradictory or inconclusive—no researcher has ever published a paper showing that trans fats are anything other than one of the most harmful products ever made.
yay data!
On July 10, 2002, the Institute of Medicine (IOM) made a statement designed to shock the FDA into action. The IOM reported that no amount of trans fats was safe, recommending an “upper intake level of zero.”
ho---ly shit
If products contain less than 0.5 gram of trans fats, the FDA allows manufacturers to claim 0 grams of trans fats on the nutrition label.
oh for fuck's sake...
Whereas workers at Oppau had been working round the clock to feed people, now they were working round the clock to kill them. Brot aus luft, “bread from air,” had become blut aus luft, “blood from air.” Bosch called the transformation “this dirty little business.”
this. fucking. guy.
When Fritz Haber was performing his experiments, he knew that chemical warfare was a violation of international law. Several years earlier, in 1907, Germany, along with 24 other nations, had signed the Hague Conventions, which forbid countries from “employing poisons and poisonous weapons.” Although poison gas was a clear violation of the conventions, Haber didn’t care. The goal was to win. And if he violated the rules, so be it. For his actions, Haber would later be branded as a war criminal.
$&+/®~^`>{_<%#~™™`€_{!!!!!!
Haber’s goal was to turn warfare into a competition among scientists; the winner would make the deadliest poison gases, distribute them most efficiently, and create the best protective gear, including gas masks.
mother. fucker.
As the meeting progressed, Hitler talked faster and louder, pounding his fist on his knees, screaming, possessed.
45?
If we could breed better animals, reasoned Galton, couldn’t we breed better people, too? Wouldn’t traits like intelligence, loyalty, bravery, and honesty also be inherited? And wouldn’t selecting for better people make for a better world? A world free of drunkenness, violence, and poverty. A world where the lower classes could be bred out of existence, no longer a burden to society.
oh my god throw this guy right into the sun
Now the eugenicists had a hard and fast number they could rely on: 70. They determined that anyone with an intelligence quotient (or IQ) score of less than 70 was unfit for procreation. To celebrate the moment, they created a new word: “moron,” from the Greek moros meaning “stupid” or “foolish.”
you motherfuckers
Nonetheless, the false notion that selective breeding could make for a better society would soon allow Americans to cloak some of their worst prejudices in the gilded robes of science.
bananacrackers with a side of what the actual fuck
“Had Jesus been among us,” said Wiggam, “He would have been president of the First Eugenic Congress.”
that he was not struck by lightning immediately upon saying this is a travesty of the highest order
Eugenicists argued that the country would need to sterilize the lower 10 percent of the population and to continue to sterilize the lower 10 percent until the gene pool was pure.
....do they realize that'll eventually include them? no? good god...
At the time of Grant’s death, and due largely to his efforts, a vast system of national parks stretching over more than eight million acres provided refuge to tens of thousands of large game animals.
he's still a completely trash human even though he saved the bison
Grant was disgusted by what he saw as he braved the congested sidewalks of his native city. He was repulsed by the bizarre customs, unintelligible languages, and peculiar religious habits of the foreigners.
disgusted by humans but not bison. asshole.
Grant’s world was collapsing. He had to do something to conserve America for natives like himself—to make America America again.
jfc. imagine if he'd had twitter
Madison Grant would provide a scientific basis for their prejudices, as well as for the prejudices of a rising National Socialist Party in Germany.
"scientific"
the type of native American of Colonial descent
you absolute bastard. the colonists ARE NOT NATIVE. mother. fucker.
H. L. Mencken, a satirist, essayist, and editor of the American Mercury, was sickened by the hauteur and superiority of those who had been born on third base and thought they had hit a triple: “My impression, though I am blond and Nordic myself, is that the genuine member of that great race, at least in modern times, is often indistinguishable from a cockroach.”
45?
Editorials in mainstream scientific publications like the Journal of the American Medical Association, the American Journal of Public Health, and the New England Journal of Medicine also supported the efforts of Adolf Hitler, the world’s most effective eugenicist.
you goat-fucking bastards
THE LESSON HERE IS little harder to describe but no less poignant: Beware of scientific biases that fit the culture of the time—beware the zeitgeist.
okay yeah
“I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
can i get an amen?
DESPITE HIS BOAST that “the intervention is harmless,” Moniz’s early lobotomy patients didn’t do nearly as well as he had claimed. Patients often suffered from vomiting, diarrhea, incontinence, nystagmus (where the eyes rhythmically vacillate uncontrollably), ptosis (drooping of the upper eyelids), kleptomania, abnormal hunger, and a disturbed orientation of time and space.
"harmless"
In short, Walter Freeman was never going to best his grandfather. But that didn’t stop him from trying.
this fucking guy...
But where William Keen advanced the state of medicine in countless ways, Walter Freeman contributed virtually nothing.
preach it!
“It has been said that if we don’t think correctly, it is because we haven’t ‘brains enough,’ ” he reasoned. “Maybe it will be shown that a mentally ill patient can think more clearly and more constructively with less brain in actual operation.”
wow. fuck this guy in particular
Freeman countered that “a brain can stand a good deal of manhandling,” and that “most of the damage is reversible.”
you, sir, are a goddamn liar
Lobotomies now share a shelf in the dusty cabinet of medical sideshows next to whips, chains, snake pits, truth serums, phrenology machines, and trephining, the ancient ritual of drilling holes in the brain to loose the evil spirits.
love this
At this point, it seems reasonable to wonder whether Nobel Prizes awarded in the first half of the 20th century came in Cracker Jack boxes.
<3
In 1967, when he was 72 years old, Walter Freeman performed his last lobotomy. When the woman died of cerebral hemorrhage, he lost his license to practice medicine.
ABOUT FUCKING TIME
Carson still wasn’t satisfied, believing that Oxford—which had taken out full-page ads in the New York Times, New York Herald Tribune, and Chicago Tribune—hadn’t done enough to promote her book.
geez
Silent Spring was a book about pesticides—a book that read like stories from the Brothers Grimm.
Today, most people under the age of 40 have probably never heard of Rachel Carson. But in the early 1960s, almost every American knew her name.
i...okay fair
Not only did DDT kill the moths, it also killed flies, mosquitoes, lice, and ticks—insects responsible for transmitting some of the world’s deadliest diseases. Better still, DDT’s killing power seemed to last for months.
better?
MALARIA WASN’T THE ONLY disease transmitted by the bite of a mosquito. DDT also dramatically reduced the incidence of yellow fever and dengue. Furthermore, DDT killed fleas, like the ones that lived on rats that transmitted murine typhus, and the ones that lived on prairie dogs and ground squirrels and transmitted Yersinia pestis, the plague. Considering the virtual elimination of all of these diseases in many countries, the National Academy of Sciences estimated in 1970 that DDT had saved the lives of 500 million people. One could argue reasonably that DDT has saved more lives than any other
...more
yay for chemicals!
“It seems certain that scientists and students of chemistry and the natural world could not have guessed how Silent Spring would pave the way for science to be sidelined in the development of laws, policies, and global strategies for disease control.”
ouch
In the end, the EPA’s decision to ban DDT wasn’t based on data; it was based on fear and misinformation.
goddammit
One of the protein structures Pauling described was called the alpha helix, a finding that allowed James Watson and Francis Crick to solve the structure of DNA: nature’s blueprint.
RAAAAAAGE
